Productive plagiarism in the Internet era isn’t for the faint of heart. Technology’s accelerating power to textually, and contextually, track “who wrote what when” has digitally updated the aphorism to “Good artists borrow, great artists steal…and get caught.”

Watching embattled educational empires strike back, however, is enlightening. Frustrated faculty and tech-savvy teaching assistants can be as ruthlessly innovative as their incorrigible charges. Good for them. My favorite precision-guided weapon in their arsenal is iParadigm’s Turnitin plagiarism detection service. With over 13.5 billion web pages indexed, Turnitin has become the term- paper gold-standard for faculties fed up with students who believe cut-and-paste/drag-and-drop manipulation of Wikipedia and JSTOR articles constitutes real writing and research. Turnitin’s effectiveness has successfully made plagiarism so onerous, so challenging and so risky that — surprise! — “smart” cheaters now calculate they might as well do their own work. Talk about an educational revolution…

So much for Tom Lehrer’s paean to the powers of plagiarism. Indeed, Turnitin’s corporate parent takes Lehrer’s lyrical interpretation of “research” quite seriously. The Oakland, CA firm has expanded beyond the ivory towered groves of academe into businesses where the line between “boilerplate” and “borrowing” has grown vanishingly small. The firm’s offering, iThenticate, sniffs out content copying malfeasance in publishing, government, law firms, finance and other text-intensive industries. Apparently, it’s catching on. Call it IP for IP — Innovative Protection for Intellectual Property.

There’s another spin that can be put on the software and systems for plagiarism detection and intellectual property protection. Right now, the dominant effort is to deter, or catch, a thief. I think smart organizations — organizations that care about information sharing, knowledge management, and creative collaboration — should see all this as infrastructure for creating new cultures of attribution. These technologies should be more than high-tech tools to track cheaters; they should be mechanisms for showing how organizations share ideas.

If you’re Wal-Mart, ExxonMobil, IBM, or McKinsey, you’ve got millions of documents, PowerPoints, presentations, speeches, and spreadsheets swirling through your enterprise. If you’re Siemens, Merck, Sony, or Toyota, you want your best people to be aware of the ideas and intellectual property they’re creating throughout the firm. Instead of using Turnitin/iThenticate systems to identify plagiarists, you want to use it to see where the expressions of ideas and insights overlap and intersect. Even if people are borrowing PowerPoint slides or promotional paragraphs as part of their patent applications or sales pitches, you want them to know — and you want the firm’s leadership to know — what’s being borrowed and what expressions are being diffused inside the organization and out.

In other words, technologies like this can dissolve once-meaningful distinctions between “plagiarism” and “attribution” because they create transparency about the creation and distribution of ideas. Automating the attribution process gives more people greater confidence that they won’t be “ripped off” by potentially “credit- grabbing” colleagues. Conversely, good/great organizational “artists” can feel more confident “borrowing/stealing” from colleagues and counterparts because they know they’ll be “caught.”

The beauty of systems like this is their win/win potential. Creative people can get credit and attribution; people who use the creative expression of others to enhance a product or a service, or close a deal, also get acknowledged. The organization has turned “plagiarism” from a furtive crime into a transparent engine of attributed productivity.

Is this a fanciful, utopian scenario of how tomorrow’s enterprise expressiveness gets created and shared? Well, it’s no more fanciful or utopian than Google’s PageRank algorithm, Amazon’s recommendation engines, or Facebook’s friendships. To the contrary, the Turnitinization/ iThenticization of internal enterprise communications allows large organizations to better leverage their economies of scale.

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